Sunday, May 13. 2007

A couple weeks ago, one of the individuals helping us gut our house referred to our project as an "onion project." That is, the more layers you peel back, the more you find needs doing. That feels so true.

So, it seems I'm a couple weekends behind on the updates. Here we go.

Last weekend (May 5) Jason, Izzy, and Bill helped us tear out more walls. The master bedroom had everything below four feet from the floor torn out (on the exterior walls), the wall between the guest bedroom and office came out, and Bill started tearing out the downstairs bathroom. Yes, we found mold pretty much every step of the way. Izzy pulled up all the carpet tack on the stairs.

Last Wednesday (May 9) I spent a few hours cleaning up sheet rock, and also tore out the wood paneling/sheet rock below the picture window in the living room. The mold there was almost as bad as as wall between the office and the bathroom.

This weekend (May 12) saw everything below four feet from the floor torn out in the second bedroom along the exterior walls. Flori agreed to the tedious (and knee-crushing) job of removing carpet-pad staples from the upstairs floor. (Thanks Flori!) After Izzy worked on some final cleanup in the bedrooms, and tore up most of the downstairs bathroom's floor, we proceeded to tear (almost all of) the bathroom out. The walls came off, the counter and cabinets are out, and the ceiling is off (taken off last week by Bill). The amusing part was the three layers of linoleum we found. The not-so-amusing part was the amount of mold. The walls behind the drawers, and next to, the counter/cabinet units were not painted. Thus, moisture had free access to the paper on the sheet rock, and had taken full advantage of it. Once the wall next to the door was off (which was moldy front and back, even worse on the back: think 3D mold), there was mold as bad, or worse, on the opposite wall (the back of the hall wall). There was also mold visible on the back of the stair walls, as well as the back of the laundry room wall. If this keeps up, we might not have any walls left down stairs. In better news, most of the studs seem solid and mold free.

As for the pipes, there were three separate joints that had come loose behind the bathroom wall due to the freeze-up. And the sewer pipe had a hole in it from a screw used to hang a cabinet in the bathroom.

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